Stop all process in android

Android process death — and the (big) implications for your app

With more developers using Dependency Injection (e.g. Dagger) in Android and adopting patterns such MVP or MVVM, this topic is more needed than ever. There is a recent spike in use of what I would call “hidden Singletons”, the same anti-pattern just bundled differently.

Your Android application (process) can be killed at any time if it’s in paused or stopped state . The state of your Activities, Fragments and Views will be saved. When your return back to the application — the system will start the process again, recreate the top activity (the Activities in the back-stack will be recreated on demand when you go back) and you will get a Bundle with the stored state.

And here lies the issue some developers don’t fully realise — the whole process was killed. So any Singletons (or any “application scope” objects), any temporary data, any data stored in your “retained Fragments” — everything will be in a state as if you just launched the application. With one big difference — the state is restored, the user is at the point where he left the app.

Imagine, in your Activity you are depending on some shared Object, or some injected dependency where you keep recent data. Most likely the application will just crash on a NullPointerException because you didn’t expect the data to be in null.

How to test the application background kill & restore?

1. Launch your application, open some new Activity, do some work.
2. Hit the Home button (application will be in the background, in stopped state).
3. Kill the Application — easiest way is to just click the red “stop” button in Android Studio.
4. Return back to your application (launch from Recent apps).
5. Crash? You are doing something wrong in your application :-).

By opening the app — the system will restore its’ state and the user will not even notice that actually the process was killed in the mean time. Well unless your application crashes because you were not prepared for it.

For this scenario it’s definitely not enough to just test your app with the “Don’t Keep Activities” options in the Debug Settings. This will just test if your activities can restore their state, but the process is never killed this way. The crashes will start coming in when you release your application, the users will open it and the leave it in background for a day and return back.

You can also set Background Process Limit to “No background processes” in Developer options. Put the application into background, launch any other application and then return back — application process will be restarted (the same as if killed due to lack of memory or battery saving).

Troublemakers in your app

• Singletons
• Any other shared instances that keep mutable data (such as injected dependencies where you keep some state)
• Data and State stored in your Application class
• Mutable static fields
• Retained fragments (state is restored, data is lost)
• Basically anything which is not stored in onSaveInstanceState and you depend on it

There is no single solution and it depends on the type of your application. Generally you should try to stay away from anything mentioned in the list, but that’s not always easy or possible.

You should be able to “reinitialise” the state — either load data from a database, SharedPreferences or reload anything needed again.

You may also have a login screen and timeout in your application — in that case it’s an acceptable approach to just detect the process kill scenario and forward the user back to the login screen.

Know the Android platform rules

Any architecture, framework or library has to play according to the Android platform rules. So anytime you see a new library or approach — think about if and how is it handling state restoration.

And as always — test your application for these cases. This particular issue is bad in the way that you will almost never see it during development and simple testing. But the end users will run into it regularly.

Follow me and read about possible solutions to this problem in the next article.

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How to stop apps from running in the background on Android

Android smartphones have gotten very powerful over the years and are great at multitasking. Over time, however, you might have seen smartphones degrade in performance and become sluggish. You may also notice that the battery life is also adversely affected. What if we tell you that on most phones, these issues can be fixed by simply optimizing the background apps? Read on to find out how!

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Why stop background apps on Android?

For those of you who chanced upon this article without actually facing an issue with their phone, you might wonder why would someone even consider to stop background apps. Here’s an explanation.

As you keep using your Android phone, you tend to install several apps on your device. Over time, chances become high that at least some of them aren’t well optimized for your phone or may have a bug. Some of these apps may even contain malware – especially the ones you did not download from trusted sources.

Oftentimes, these apps may keep running in the background even after you thought you closed them. The result is sluggish performance and a marked reduction in battery life. Let us now check out the various steps that can be taken to solve this problem and stop background apps on Android.

Update your phone to the newest Android version

In case you have a relatively old phone with you, the simplest way to stop apps from running in the background is to make sure your phone runs the latest version of Android. Starting Android 10, Google has introduced several power management features that prevent errant apps from consuming too much power or hogging too much power.

Android 11 is the latest stable version of Android and provide great battery optimization tools/ © Mr.Mikla / Shutterstock.com

If you are on a newer version of Android (the latest stable version is Android 11) you are already doing pretty good as Google has enhanced power management features even further. On phones running Android 10 and 11, it would be a good idea to turn on a feature called Adaptive Battery. On phones running stock Android, you can enable Adaptive Battery by going into Settings -> Battery -> Adaptive preferences.

Apart from optimizing errant apps, the Adaptive battery mode also optimizes the charging speed of your phone to ensure that your battery lasts a long time.

Analyze battery consumption statistics

There is no denying that Android offers a comprehensive battery statistics tool where you can see what apps are draining the battery the most. To access the battery stats page tap on Settings -> Battery ->View battery usage.

The phone will now open a page with the list of apps that are consuming power. What is helpful about this page is that it lists these apps in an order — with the ones consuming the most power placed at the top. Chances are high you will see some of your most used apps high up in the list. However, if you note some third party apps that you know you haven’t used for a long time in this list, it might be a good idea to either force stop or uninstall it.

The Battery stats page is a veritable goldmine of information/ © NextPit

To force stop or uninstall an app, tap on the app and and you will see a page with both these options. Note that you may also see some apps here that are part of Android and Google Mobile Services. You can ideally leave them be since they are essential for the smooth and stable functioning of your phone.

Control your background processes

Incase you are not too happy with the results of disabling apps listed within the battery stats menu, it’s time to try out slightly advanced steps. The best way to gain control of your processes is to have a dig around under the hood using the monitoring tools built into Android.

In some cases, before you can start, you need to enable developer options.

1. In most versions of Android, this involves going to Settings > About phone and then tapping Build number about seven or so times. You’ll get a notification telling you that Developer options have been unlocked once you’re done.
2. For many handsets, the next thing you need to look for is a setting called Processes, Process Stats, or Running services. You can find this in Settings > System > Advanced> Developer options > Running services. That option takes you to a list of running processes showing how much RAM each is using.
3. Obviously, it’ll be tempting to stop the most RAM-hungry apps from running in the background, but you’ll want to pay some attention to what you’re stopping before you go ahead. Stopping some apps might crash your phone.
4. You can also tap the settings option when in the Services/Processes menu to switch between running processes and cached processes.

Control Android services from within Developer options / © NextPit

I’m in! But I don’t know which apps to stop

OK. If you don’t want your app/phone to crash, err on the side of caution and use some common sense. The app marked ‘Google Services‘, or pretty much any app that starts with ‘Google’ shouldn’t be manually stopped.

On the other hand, if you look through the list and see messengers and music players idly draining your battery in the background, then you can go ahead and stop them in relative safety. Truly crucial apps usually won’t allow you to force stop them anyway.

1. To stop an app manually via the processes list, head to Settings > Developer Options > Processes (or Running Services) and click the Stop button. Voila!
2. To Force Stop or Uninstall an app manually via the Applications list, head to Settings > Apps > All Apps and select the app you want to modify.
3. Don’t delete any apps that appear when you select the Show System Apps option. You can see system apps by tapping on the three dots on the top right corner.

Apps that you rarely use are better off uninstalled altogether. / © NextPit

Task killers and RAM optimizers: the great debate

With Android software and hardware improving over time, some people will argue that the use of task killer apps is going to do more harm than good in terms of processing and battery life. As one of the problems you’re trying to fix is apps running in the background draining your resources, adding another one that has the purpose of doing explicitly that (it needs to monitor the services in use on your phone, therefore always needs to be running) seems a bit counter-intuitive.

A task killer that repeatedly force-closes an app in the background over and over is almost certainly going to drain your battery more as it continues the ‘restart and kill’ process. You might be better off not installing the task killer in the first place and just letting it run.

So there you have it! We have discussed several ways in which you can can stop background apps from running on Android devices. We hope the steps mentioned here proved helpful for you. In case you know if any other cooler methods that we might have missed out, share them with us in the comments below!

This article was comprehensively updated in July 2021. Older comments have been retained.

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How To Create, Start, Stop Android Background Service

Android background service is an android component that runs in the background. There is no GUI for users to interact with the android background service object directly, it is usually started in android activity and runs in the same thread of the activity. When users quit the android-activity, the android background service will also exit automatically. This article introduces how to create, start, stop android background service with examples.

1. How To Create Android Background Service In Android Studio.

1. Start android studio and right-click the package name in the android studio left project panel.
2. Click the menu item New —> Service —> Service.
3. Give the android background service a name by input its name in the next New Android Component window Class Name input box, check both the Exported and Enabled checkbox. If you check the Exported checkbox, then this service component can be invoked by other android apps besides the current android app. If you check the Enabled checkbox then this service component is enabled to be used by other android apps.
4. When you click the Finish button in the above window, it will create the android background service class that extends android.app.Service. It will also add the service object configuration XML data in AndroidManifest.xml file as below.

2. Android Background Service Methods.

If you want to customize the android background service component, you need to override the below methods.

1. onCreate : When the service object is created, it will run this method. This method runs only once.
2. onStartCommand : This method is invoked every time when the background service is started. You can execute tasks or start child threads in this method. Because the android background service is executed in the main activity thread, so if you do not use child threads and if the task is very time-consuming, the android activity main thread will be blocked by the service object.
3. onDestroy : This method is invoked when the background service is destroyed. You can release related resources in it such as close database connection, write data to file, etc.
4. stopSelf : If you want to stop and exit the running service in your source code, you can call this method.

3. How To Start Stop Android Background Service In Activity.

1. If you want to start an android background service in an android activity, you can run the below source code.
2. Call stopSerivce(intent) method to stop the service.
3. If you want to make sure the background service is running after you start it, you can go to Settings —> Developer options —> Running services to see it.
4. If you want to see the running andriod service in a terminal, you can run the below shell command to list all the running android services.
5. If you want to list the android service by its name, you can run the below shell command.

The result like below:

4. Android Background Service Example.

Below is this example project java files structure.

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